


Whirling in the autumn winds

by MirandaTam



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Brain Damage, Depression, Friends don't let friends beat themselves up over HYDRA assholes, Gen, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Season/Series 01, Science, Self-Harm, self-harm by proxy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-12
Updated: 2014-09-12
Packaged: 2018-02-17 04:12:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2296181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MirandaTam/pseuds/MirandaTam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Melinda May copes with the fallout of HYDRA's reveal. (She doesn't, really.) </p>
<p>So does Fitz. (Neither does he.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Whirling in the autumn winds

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" part III.  
>  _The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds._  
>  It was a small part of the pantomime.

Melinda didn’t throw the fight, not exactly.

Besides, it’s not as if she lost. She just… held back a little. Maybe let him get a few more punches in than he would have. Not because she wanted him to win, hell no!

There’s always that _but_ , isn’t there, and this one comes when Coulson sees her face and he does that thing where his expression freezes and he gets all tight-lipped.

“You should see the other guy,” she says, because Coulson is still Coulson, and dry humor has always been a good way to distract him. It’s his experience with Barton; since Barton never, ever stops cracking jokes, even when he’s hurt, Coulson thinks that other, saner people will naturally stop being funny when they’re injured. She’s used this to distract him before, but this is the first time when she doesn’t know why she’s distracting him.

(That’s a lie; she knows exactly why she threw that fight. She just hasn’t admitted it to herself yet.)

They get back to the bus, and then to the Playground, and only then is Melinda alone with her thoughts.

She stands in front of the mirror in her room – it’s full-length, tips of her toes to the top of her head.

Slowly, very slowly, she undresses. Pulls her shirt off, unzips her pants, lets them drop. Unclasps her bra.

She doesn’t look at herself quite yet, avoids looking directly at the mirror. Still naked, she stalks over to the sink and dips her face in the water. It’s almost too cold, raising goosebumps on her body.

She wonders what it would be like if she let herself drown here.

Instead, she lifts her head out of the water, wipes her face off with a towel. Wipes off the faint traces of makeup that almost every female agent wears, cleans off the traces of blood that remain from her fight.

Then she goes and looks in the mirror.

It’s not a pretty sight; she’s bruised all over, not just on her face. Her left side is mostly one big bruise, from where Ward had slammed her into the ground a few times; there are marks all across her torso, her shoulders and arms, her chest. There are scratches, too. Melinda recalls them falling through a wall or two over the course of the fight, and walls don’t come apart very smoothly.

Carefully, very carefully, she reaches up and presses one of the bruises.

It’s a dull pain, nothing like the initial white-hot pain of a punch or a cut. That pain is better, she thinks, more immediate, sharper. But this pain is still pain. She lifts her fingers up to the big bruise on her shoulder –

“Um, Agent May?” Skye’s at the door. “Can I come in?”

“Give me a minute,” she tells Skye, and dresses herself.

 

She practices in the gym, an hour before she told Skye to show up.

Imagine Ward’s face.

Punch, kick, punch.

Imagine Ward’s dick.

Kick, punch, kick.

Imagine her own face–

She’s such an idiot. Why, why, why? She knows the rules, trust no one, take nothing for granted, don’t get emotionally attached–

She wasn’t in love with him, or anything ridiculous like that. But even after Lorelei, fuck, even after the false clairvoyant, she’d trusted him. And she had been wrong to.

She had made a mistake, and now people were wounded, people were dead because she hadn’t spotted the mole.

She knows better than to cut herself. Really, she does – not only would it be a liability in the field, but she literally lives in a compound full of spies or spies in training. And Coulson misses next to nothing. Besides, her therapist would be so disappointed – Melinda May, recovering from PTSD, so strong, so brave. Not going to break under the pressure, not going to succumb to a way out that she knows isn’t really a way out. Melinda May, self-harm? You must be joking.

It’s so much easier to just let other people hit her.

 

Melinda goes out on missions.

Melinda gets injured on missions.

Melinda comes back from the missions and skips medical.

She feels bad, betraying Coulson’s trust like this – he trusts her to take care of herself, to be the best agent she can be, to not be so… so broken inside.

(A part of her can’t help but notice that he doesn’t comment on it, though – on how fake all of her smiles are, on how she spends all of her time in the gym, alone or with Skye, on how she comes back from every single mission with some sort of injury. Part of her argues that he doesn’t care any more. Another part argues that it’s not his fault, he just hasn’t noticed – but this is Phil Coulson, he should know. He is The Spy, after Fury and Romanov. How could he not notice _this_?)

So she falls into a routine – she knows her limits, how and where to throw her fights just enough to hurt a little, come back, heal up just in time for the next mission.

Most of the time.

There’s a nasty mission in Liverpool where everything goes wrong and Melinda throws the fight, throws her shoulder, and eventually gets thrown out of a second-story window.

It’s sort of fantastic, actually – she doesn’t break anything important, only fractures a few ribs. Her body stings all over, throbbing on the surface with blood trickling out from a million tiny cuts. She’s going to be one giant bruise in the morning. She’s never felt more alive.

And then she gets back to the team, to Coulson’s grim face and the words “Hydra have taken back their prisoners, we need to go defend the base,” and that’s the beginning of the nightmare.

They fly back to the US as fast as the Bus can handle.

“It’s going to be a trap,” she can hear Skye mumble over the radio.

“Of course it is,” Coulson replies calmly. “But since we know that, we’ll be going in prepared. We’re not going to lose this fight. We can’t.”

Melinda’s shoulder twinges.

_Well, shit._

 

 

It’s a bit of a – no. No, not _a bit of_. It’s a giant clusterfuck of a disaster.

They get to the base – not the Playground, but the anti-HYDRA base the US Military has set up – and Melinda and Coulson both can tell that it’s already too late, but they have to at least _try_.

“Our first priority is recovering technology,” Coulson orders. “We can’t just let HYDRA take it.”

“Remind me why we let the military take it?” Skye asks. “Because look how _that’s_ turning out.”

“Well, to be fair, we didn’t do so hot keeping it ourselves,” Coulson reminds her. “May–”

“Somebody needs to try and stop the prisoners,” Melinda says, smiling just a bit.

He takes one look at her, and his eyes widen. “Melinda–”

She’s off before he can tell her _don’t_. Forgiveness and permission, right?

Melinda races through the hallways towards the prison complex. It’s too late, in all probability, but on the off chance that it isn’t, they can’t just let the prisoners _(let Ward)_ go.

Her comm crackles in her ear. _“Dammit, May, don’t–”_

“Please don’t make me go against a direct order, sir,” she tells him. “Somebody needs to do this job. I’m the best.”

_“It’s too personal.”_

“It’s just as personal for him, now,” she retorts. “Nobody else–”

She stops short, because she’s there, and she _is_ too late, all the cell doors are blasted open, all of the prisoners are gone–

Except Ward.

He’s sitting in on the floor of his still-intact cell. In the few seconds when she can see him and he can’t see her, his grumpy face is on, the one that says ‘ _You may have screwed me over but fuck you, see if I care.’_ Honestly, it’s a bit of a relief to see that some things, at least, weren’t feigned.

Melinda steps into his view and his face goes expressionless. He’s sitting up straighter, but still taking care to look nonchalant.

“You’re a little late,” he says after a few seconds of silence.

“I’d noticed,” Melinda says, keeping her voice calm. “They figure out that you’re useless or something?”

His flinch is barely visible; good thing Melinda’s watching for it. “They weren’t exactly happy with me selling information.”

She raises an eyebrow.

He shrugs and sits back. “It’s not exactly as if I was loyal to them, outside of Garret.”

She’s thinking of a response when she hears a helicopter land on the roof. Judging by the footsteps, people start pouring out. A whining sound starts up – somebody’s cutting a hole through the roof. There’s plenty of cover in the room; she hides.

“You going to give me away?” she asks, not loudly but loud enough for Ward to hear.

He shrugs. That’s going to have to be enough, because Hydra goons start pouring through the roof.

She’s revising her analysis by the time all ten are in the room; these aren’t goons. This is Strike Team Epsilon.

“Coulson’s team is in the building,” their leader is saying. “Priority is capture, excluding Specialists Antoine Triplett and Melinda May. They’re attempting to recover weaponry, and may have their hands on some of it already.”

“Sir,” one woman says. “What about…” she gestures at Ward, still sitting nonchalantly in his cell.

The leader glances over at Ward. “The extraction team left him for a good reason, whatever that might have been.”

Melinda wants to laugh. They hadn’t even been told why Ward had been left?

“Personal vendetta,” Ward says, sitting up and clearly (to Melinda, at least) lying through his teeth. “I slept with the extraction leader’s girlfriend.”

“Well, then.” The leader frowns a bit. “I’ll just check that.” He reaches up to touch his comms. “Hello? Yes, there’s a prisoner still here, what–” He stops and listens. “Roger,” he finishes, lowering his hand. “Well, it looks like–”

He doesn’t get a chance to finish because Melinda darts forwards and snaps his neck in one clean move. Her pistol is drawn and pumping icers into the Strike Team as they begin to respond; four more are down by the time they’re within close combat range. She takes out one more in hand-to-hand, idly wondering how they allowed someone that idiotic on their team. The remaining four surround her, weapons drawn.

“Surrender,” one of them says.

She smiles.

The fight begins in earnest.

The one behind Melinda charges forwards; she drops, grabs him, and uses his own momentum to carry him into the one in front of her. They aren’t down permanently, but it’ll take them a minute to get up, and that’s all she needs.

The two at her sides are more cautious, so she takes the fight to them. She strides towards the one on her left, attacks with a punch to her opponent’s stomach and following up with a hammer-fist to his collarbone while he’s distracted blocking her punch, and then pivoting to a roundhouse kick at the one trying to come up behind her.

Her opponents go down; they’re out of the fight. That’s good, because the other two have gotten up again. They’re more cautious now.

“Melinda May,” one of them says.

She inclines her head slightly.

They glance at each other and, almost simultaneously scramble towards the ladder that’s hanging from the hole in the ceiling.

Melinda takes the one who had charged her by leaping forward to land on his back. She hears a crack; he won’t be getting up again.

The last one turns, realizes she can’t escape, and swings a desperate punch at Melinda.

Melinda lets it hit her chest; there’s no way a punch like that could break anything.

She remembers her fractured ribs half a second too late.

She’s already grabbing the woman’s arm, rolling with her, slamming her back into the hard ground. The woman doesn’t get up; Melinda thinks that this seems like a good idea, and stays lying down for a few seconds while her ribs scream in broken agony.

“What the hell was that?”

Oh. Right. Ward.

Melinda groans and tries to sit up.

“No, don’t sit up, you complete _idiot_. You threw that fight. Why–”

Melinda heaves herself up, ignoring both Ward and her ribs. “Shut up,” she rasps.

“Don’t puncture a lung,” he snaps back.

“Ward. Shut the fuck up,” Melinda says through clenched teeth.

Ward actually shuts up; it’s a miracle.

The helicopter is still on the roof above them, and somebody is moving around near it; now that Ward is being quiet, they can both hear it clearly.

There’s also a faint hissing sound – static, maybe, but Melinda can’t tell where it’s coming from. She takes a deep breath… becomes very, very still… _listens_ …

It’s coming from the Strike Team’s leader. His comms are buzzing faintly. She hauls herself up and walks over to where his body is lying so she can hear his comm.

_“…port in… Strike Team Epsilon, report in… What’s going on?”_

Melinda whips her head up to the hole in the roof in time to see a Hydra agent poke his head into the room. She’s halfway to the ladder in time to see him pull the pin on a grenade and drop it into the room.

She recognizes the style; she has five seconds before it explodes. She can get under cover, or she can do something risky. She can shield herself, or she can fight. She can stay safe, or she can counterattack.

Melinda catches the grenade mid-air and launches it back up onto the roof.

The last thing she really remembers is the bang of the grenade detonating; after that, the shockwave hits, there’s a sharp pain in her leg, and she blacks out.

 

“May.”

…

“Agent May.”

…

“Melinda, I know you’re awake.”

She grumbles and tries to pull the blankets up; they’re too thin, not her blankets.

Hospital blankets.

Melinda cracks open one of her eyes, decides it’s too bright, and shuts it.

“Agent May, open your goddamn eyes.”

She makes a face and squints up at Phil. “Wh’happn’d?”

“Apparently, you threw a live grenade instead of getting under cover.” There’s a clear undercurrent of anger in his otherwise dry voice.

“Oh. That.” She blinks, still trying to adjust her eyes. “He was gonna get away.”

“You had three broken ribs, two more fractured ribs, and a sprained shoulder. And that was _before_ you got shrapnel to the leg.” Wow, Phil is really angry.

“You’re angry,” Melinda says.

“I’m angry because you got yourself hurt when you could have avoided it, Agent,” Phil snaps.

“But it was my fault,” Melinda says, and _wow_ something is going on because she was not going to tell him that.

Phil sighs. “We really need to have this discussion sometime when you’re _not_ on heavy-duty painkillers. Go back to sleep.”

 

The next time Melinda wakes up, she’s still on the painkillers, but she’s alone. She can’t quite reach the clipboard that would tell her what she’s on, since somebody’s tied her ribs down to the bed.

“May?”

She blinks. That sounded like Fitz.

“Over here.”

She turns her head to one side; nobody’s there.

“Wow, those must be some good meds. Other side.”

She flops her head over to the other side and hey, there’s Fitz.

“You’re awake,” she says.

“Pretty much, yeah,” he says.

She frowns. Something is weird with his voice.

“My, uh, speech centers got a little damaged.”

Did she say that out loud? She didn’t think she’d said that out loud.

“Yep, that was out loud.”

“Everything is sort of fuzzy,” Melinda admits.

“I think they’ll only have you on those for a little longer,” Fitz says. “Honestly, though, I’m surprised you’re awake, they have–” he struggles with his words a bit. “Sleep-inducing… things,” he finally decides.

And wow, now that he mentions it, Melinda is really tired. “Just gonna close my eyes for a minute,” she mutters, and settles back into her sheets.

 

Everything is horribly sharp when Melinda finally wakes up and stays awake.

Phil is sitting by her bedside, looking unsympathetic.

Melinda groans. “How long was I out?”

“We need to talk,” Phil says simply.

“About what?” she mumbles, staring up at the ceiling. “How long was I out? When can I get back in the field?”

“You need to take it slowly. May, I’m worried–”

“What damage did I–”

“You’ve been getting hurt, don’t think–”

“Coulson, just tell me how long–”

“I talked to Ward.”

Melinda shuts up.

“He had some very… _interesting_ things to say about how you were fighting,” Phil continues, using that nonchalant-outside-furious-inside tone of his.

“You’re trusting–”

“Things that the security cameras – some of which were still working – back up,” he mentions idly. “So.”

She stays silent.

Phil sighs. “Melinda. What’s going on?”

Silence. Melinda keeps her face blank.

“Okay, then.” Phil stands up. “You’re benched from active duty until you can explain to me why you’ve been throwing your fights and prove to me that you’re not going to do it again.”

She sits bolt upright. “ _What–_ ”

“You’ll be hanging around with Fitz a lot,” Coulson calls back to her from the door. “Be nice. Have fun. Don’t set anything on fire that’s not supposed to be.”

And then he leaves.

Melinda stares at the door for a bit, and then collapses back onto the hospital bed.

“Fucking hospitals, fucking handlers, fucking _Coulson_ –”

“Hydra,” Fitz suggests.

“Goddamn motherfucking asslicking _Hydra_ ,” Melinda snarls, and stuffs her head under the pillow.

 

Melinda’s released from the hospital a week later with a brace for her ribs, a cast on her leg, and orders not to fight, walk, exercise, or do anything really interesting.

Coulson gives her additional orders to not leave the Playground, which is, in Melinda’s opinion, complete bullshit. She’s not going to work out whatever issues Coulson thinks she has sitting around on her ass playing Flappy Bird all day.

But those are Coulson’s orders, and some idiot went and made him the director, so she doesn’t exactly have much of a choice.

The Playground is mostly empty. Koenig spends most of his time alone, monitoring… things, Melinda’s not sure what exactly. He creeps her out, anyways; clones, life model decoys, whatever he is – it sets off some superstitious impulse inside her, however practical she tries to be. Besides, he’s so… cheerful.

Fitz, on the other hand, is anything but cheerful. He gets released from the hospital a couple of days after her, and during the five days since then has been holed up in his lab, doing science. Alone, without Simmons, since she’s out on missions most of the time.

So when Melinda finally gets bored enough to go see what he’s actually up to, she’s not exactly surprised to find him passed out on a lab bench.

It’s a good thing she brought food and a book. She sets the food down on the clearest table, sits down, and waits for Fitz to get hungry enough to wake up.

“Bleargh,” Fitz says half an hour later. “What? May?”

At least, that’s what Melinda thinks he says – his brain isn’t exactly online yet, so the slur left over from the brain damage is even worse than normal.

“Morning,” she says.

“Night,” he corrects absently.

“Morning,” she points out. “It’s past midnight.”

“Pedant,” he grumbles. “What do you want?” Each word is carefully pronounced and separated from the others. Melinda had no clue one could do that and still retain a Scottish accent.

“Something to explode,” she deadpans.

“Ah,” Fitz says. “A reprieve from the banality ofevraylve.” He pauses, grits his teeth, and re-finishes, “ _of every day life._ ”

“Whatever you want to call it,” Melinda says.

“Sorry to dis-app-point,” and Melinda can hear him sounding out the last word, “But not much is going on here. I can’t do much with no…” he pauses, searching for a word. “Hands,” he finishes finally.

His speech patterns are so at odds with the Fitz she knows. He stops for half a second between every word, making sure he won’t stumble or slur too much. Words over a few syllables – basically everything he learned to get his however many doctorates – are right out. But Melinda hadn’t thought that he’d lost his hands – she could see them right there. “You have hands,” she points out.

“I need steady-er ones. Mine shake too much,” he mumbles. “No real ex-per-i-ments for me any more.”

“What have you been working on, then?” she asks.

“You would not und-unnerd…” he closes his eyes and clenches his fists as much as he can. “Not get it,” he ends.

“Try me,” she says. “And if I need something clarified, I’ll ask, and you can explain it. I literally have nothing better to do.”

“Okay,” Fitz agrees after a moment.

He’s right; she doesn’t understand most of it. But from what she does understand – and she understands what is to both of them a surprising amount, partially because Fitz is forced to use small words – he’s trying to build some sort of robot to do his actual experiments for him.

Melinda glances around the lab. Now that she knows what to look for, she can see broken robot pieces everywhere. Most of them look like they’ve exploded.

“I can’t get the wiring right,” Fitz explains, speaking a little faster. It’s definitely much harder to understand him, but Melinda fucking May is not put off by a little difficulty understanding something. She understands enough, and pieces together the rest. “I keep zapping them.”

“Show me,” Melinda tells him.

“Did you even pass physics?” Fitz asks skeptically.

“Yes.”

Fitz raises an eyebrow.

“What, just because I’m one of the punches-and-guns people means that I don’t have a working knowledge of basic circuitry?” Melinda sighs. “I wanted to be an astronaut when I was younger. I know at least basic science.”

“ _You_ wanted to be a…” Fitz is clearly hesitant to even try saying _astronaut_.

“You didn’t?” Melinda shoots back.

Fitz raises his hands in defeat. “Fine. I’ll show you.”

 

 

They wrap up around three in the morning. Fitz actually goes to bed then, but Melinda stays up a little later, wandering around the lab, familiarizing herself with it. She’s stuck here, after all – she may as well try doing something useful.

When she wakes up, she brings a book, and sits outside the lab. It can’t be helpful to Fitz to have her in his hair all the time.

That means that Melinda hears what’s going on before she sees it.

It starts with a crash. Something metallic, probably hollow, falls down to the floor. A few seconds later, a scream of inarticulate rage, one that doesn’t penetrate past the soundproofing on the lab – or it wouldn’t have, except that Melinda found the one weak point to sit and read by. Lastly, more crashes, some of them more like tinkles. Breaking glass.

She’s up and into the lab as fast as she can be.

It takes her a moment to spot Fitz – he’s curled up in a tight little ball in a corner behind one of the lab benches, broken glass scattered all around him.

“Fitz,” Melinda says quietly. “What happened?” She knows what happened. But it’ll do him good to say it.

Nothing but a strangled sob escapes him.

Melina knows that she should… well, hug him, or something. But that’s not her style. Instead, she goes over to a cabinet and pulls out a hand-broom and dustpan to start cleaning up the glass.

Fitz is quiet as she starts to sweep around him.

“I can help,” he says finally.

“I got it,” Melinda tells him.

Fitz curls in on himself a little more. “I’m not–”

“I’m doing this because you’re upset, not because you have brain damage,” Melinda says, as bluntly as possible. “I am doing this for my friend who is curled up crying on the floor, okay? You can clean up broken glass yourself. But you’re feeling bad right now, so I’m helping out.”

Fitz is silent for a few seconds. “Okay,” he says, barely audible even in the nearly silent lab.

Melinda gets the glass cleaned up; thankfully there were no liquids or weird chemicals in the flasks when Fitz had smashed them, so that’s one less thing to worry about. Once that is done, she goes and sits right next to him, leaning her back against the wall.

“Coulson is going about this all wrong,” she says after a few minutes of silence. “Come to the gym tomorrow morning.”

“Why,” she thinks she hears Fitz ask.

“Because what the brain damage did was that it rewired you,” Melinda tells him. “Not your personality, but your reflexes. You try to lift your left foot, you end up lowering your right. Try to grab something with your right hand, end up waving your left hand. You don’t need a robot to do things for you. You need to relearn how to move your body.”

There’s a mumbled “don’t want to” from Fitz.

Melinda thinks back to Simmons. What would Simmons do?

She whaps Fitz gently (for her) on the head.

“Ow,” he snaps, and looks up. “Whassatfor?”

“For being fatalistic,” she tells him. “You can do this. You can get through this.”

Fitz stares at her for a moment, before sighing and leaning his head back. “I know. It’s just…” he struggles with his word choice. “It’s just hard. With no more meds.”

“What?”

Fitz looks back over at Melinda. “What? I have meds. That I can’t take, because of other meds for the…” he gestures awkwardly at his head.

“Meds for what?” Melinda asks carefully.

“… Depression,” Fitz finally tells her. “Mild, but chronic.” He shrugs. “It… makes it all worse. The little voice in the back of your head, you know? Whispering at me.”

“Telling you what?” Melinda asks neutrally. _The little voice at the back of your head, making everything worse…_

He shrugs. “Nothing much.”

“Fitz.”

He takes a deep breath. When he speaks, he keeps his tone flat and disinterested. “That I’m useless. That I can’t do anything, with my brain damage. It was… it was my fault, trusting Ward too much.” He closes his eyes for a few seconds, and then opens them and looks straight at Melinda. “What about you?”

Melinda blinks in surprise. “What?”

Fitz rolls his eyes. “I’m not one of you super-spies, but I’m not an idiot. I heard the nurses talking, back in the hospital. You’ve got dozens of minor injuries, dating back…” He loses control of his voice for a moment and has to pause.

“So maybe I’ve been a little sloppy,” Melinda tries to dismiss his concerns.

“Bull shit,” Fitz says flatly. “Injuries like that, starting when Ward… left us? And Coulson, grounding you for _throwing your fights?_ I know you don’t like your nickname, but you’re Melinda Motherfucking May. There’s no way the injuries I saw were mistakes.”

Melinda–

–Stands up and walks away.

 

 

Fitz comes to the gym the next morning, hovering awkwardly in the doorway for a minute before stepping inside.

Melinda could run. She could avoid Fitz, go back to her room, stay away from all of the topics he’d mentioned last night. Hell, if she wanted to, she could leave the base, leave the team, go live on a remote island in the Pacific, nobody to bother her but bugs and animals. It would be boring as hell, but she could do it.

She stays, because… she’s not sure why, but she _stays_ , and that is the important thing, and she gestures to Fitz to come over to where she’s standing.

“This exercise,” she says before he can get a word out, “Is all about flow. You stand one place, you’re going another; that is the goal. I’ll walk you through it the first few times, then you keep doing it. You won’t get it perfect for a while. This is a slow process.” She ends there, not quite sure how to reassure him; instead, she takes his hands in hers and physically guides him through a few motions, and then does it again.

“Now you try on your own,” she says, and steps back.

He flubs it, of course. It was easy, with Melinda holding him against all his learned impulses; it’s harder when he has to do it himself. “Sorry,” he mutters.

“No _sorrys_ ,” she says. “Again.”

On his third try, she sees the problem. “The goal is not speed,” she says, and does it herself, but she does it molasses slow, with each centimeter taking a few seconds. “The goal is to start out one way, and then end another way. Take as long as you like.”

Fitz nods, looking glum.

This attempt goes much better, though he tries to speed up halfway through when he thinks he has it, and almost ends up falling flat on his face.

“Again,” Melinda says, “Slower.”

He inches through the exercise, again and again, long enough for a normal person to get bored and for a normal Fitz to go crazy, but Melinda May waits, watches, and says “Again” one more time.

And then he manages it.

He breaks out into this glorious smile, and Melinda realizes that that’s what’s been missing. Fitz hasn’t been smiling.

And that’s just… heartbreaking, because Fitz is the smiler of the group.

“Excellent,” she tells him. “You did perfectly.”

“Now try it again.”

 

 

It’s slow progress, but it’s there.

A week after Melinda starts training him, Fitz is dropping fewer things. He’s smiling again – of course he is, she thinks, idiot Coulson, thinking that Fitz could ever be happy without being able to accomplish things – and she’s seen him, once or twice when he thinks she isn’t looking, take a deep breath, calm down, and go through his exercises, instead of getting angry and breaking things.

And Melinda is–

Fitz operates in experiments: set a goal, do that goal, analyze the results, celebrate or cry depending on the results. (Okay, so Melinda doesn’t exactly know everything about the scientific process.)

Melinda? She works like one of the exercises she’s been teaching Fitz. Go slowly, smoothly, it doesn’t matter as long as you get where you’re going in the end. But if you speed it up, you can deal some major damage, and if that doesn’t work there’s always the option of punching things in the face.

She tried taking it too fast, like she’d been telling Fitz. Coulson, Hydra, Ward… she was taking it too fast, and punching things in the face.

“Hey, Agent May!” Fitz calls out. “Come over here.”

She looks up and raises an eyebrow questioningly.

“What? _Somebody_ needs to teach you actual science,” Fitz says, scoffing as if it’s obvious.

“All right,” she says, her lips curving into a slow smile. “What sort of _actual science_ will you be teaching me?”

“Physics,” Fitz says, relishing the word. “Engineering, thermodynamics, kinematics. Circuits! Explosives,” he says, trying to tempt her.

She almost laughs, but that would ruin her reputation. “I do know the basics,” she reminds him. “I actually graduated high school, once upon a time. And I can diffuse bombs.”

“ _High school physics,_ ” Fitz mutters, turning it into a curse. “I’ll be teaching you the interesting stuff.”

“Like what?” Melinda prompts him.

“Okay, so. Did you know that the more you accelerate matter, or even just the more matter there is – well, actually, those two aren’t mutually exclusive…”

Melinda lets the science wash over her. Fitz is doing better; he’s slowing down, speaking words the way she’s been trying to get him to do the exercises. It’s not perfect, of course; it’ll take time to get him back a hundred percent. But they’re taking it one step at a time, and it seems to be working–

“Wait,” Melinda says, “Did you just say that it slows down _time?_ ”

Okay, so physics is pretty cool.

 

 

She wakes up to Fitz unconscious on a lab bench, various scraps of metal and bits of wire scattered around the tables and the floor, and a small flying robot hovering worriedly over Fitz’s head.

_What the fuck,_ she thinks, and then she sees the bottles.

_Aha. Alcohol._

Fitz seems mostly clothed, in that he has his underwear on under a lab coat; Melinda is fully dressed, but she’s fully capable of dressing herself while drunk.

She hopes they didn’t have sex; the last time she had sex–

The last time she got drunk–

Oh, god.

She makes it to the bathroom in time for the contents of her stomach to heave themselves out.

She sits there for a minute, and then she throws up again, and _again_ and her eyes _do not water_ and how the hell could she get that _distracted,_ can’t she remember why she’s here, why she’s a failure, how completely he–

“Whoa, hey there,” Fitz says, kneeling down next to her, pulling her hair back out of her face, making sure she doesn’t hit her head.

“Sorry,” she rasps. “Too much… whatever. I should–”

Fitz raises one eyebrow at her, and he learned that from _her,_ he’s not supposed to use it _against_ her.

“Shit,” she mutters, because she’s supposed to be better at lying than this, but she has a pounding headache and just vomited up the contents of her stomach so hard she’ll be surprised if there’s anything left in there. She _needs_ to be better at lying than this, because Ward–

She leans over the toilet and starts retching, and she was right, there wasn’t anything left for her to throw up.

She stops, finally, and lets Fitz help her clean up, and lets him guide her over out of the lab’s bathroom, through the lab, to the lounge with the really soft couches, because she’s just so damn tired of fighting and running.

“What is it?” Fitz asks, once they’ve made themselves comfortable.

“Nothing,” Melinda says, “Just… memories.” It’s not even totally a lie.

“I get nightmares about Ward,” Fitz says bluntly, and that was _not_ what Melinda was expecting. “I feel like it was my fault, but I know in my head it’s not.” He meets her eyes squarely. “It wasn’t your fault. Nobody knew. Hill didn’t know, Romanov didn’t know, hell, _Fury_ didn’t know. He took you in, so what? He took _everyone_ in. Hell, I was halfway to propositioning him myself when Jemma said that both of you had come in for STD analyses.”

That… was something that Melinda hadn’t known, actually. “I’m a field agent,” she says instead of asking him more. “I _should_ have known.”

Fitz doesn’t sigh, but she can tell he wants to. “Melinda May, repeat after me. _There is no way I could have known about Ward._ ”

“Fitz–”

“Just do it, okay? You gave me my body back. Let me give you this.”

Melinda is silent for a moment, and then she takes a deep, shuddering breath. “There’s no way I could have known about Ward,” she says, and it feels like a death sentence, but it feels so liberating that she could cry. But she’s Melinda May, and she doesn’t cry.

“Good,” Fitz says, and doesn’t press her more. “You know, it’s been a month since I woke up? That’s why we were drinking, I think – it all gets a little fuzzy around eight. I think we built a robot?”

He sounds so _bewildered_ , Melinda thinks, and she’s been crying and vomiting and accepting herself, the only thing she can do is start _laughing_. So she does, first a little chuckle, then fully dissolving into laughter.

Fitz looks _terrified,_ and that only makes her laugh more, and then he starts grinning too, and suddenly they’re two hung-over ex-SHIELD agents cracking up on a couch.

_There is no way I could have known about Ward,_ Melinda tells herself. _There is no way I could have known about Ward._

_Okay._

_Good._

_Again._

**Author's Note:**

> I know nothing about martial arts, or about brain damage, so I've probably portrayed both of them horribly. If any of it is offensive, rather than just inaccurate, PLEASE let me know.
> 
> I can't believe I'm actually done with this - it's one of those fics that I write at eleven at night when everybody else is asleep and I'm feeling depressed. Surprisingly cathartic, also surprisingly effective for getting depressing fics written. Glad that I managed to end it on a sorta-high note.
> 
> This probably won't get continued, especially with its probability of being jossed before the end of the month, but if I have any spectacularly good ideas I might just whip something up.


End file.
